


Snow Day on Ahch-To

by bethagain



Series: Island Life [1]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Flash Freeze Fic Challenge, Gen, Jedi Training, Snow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-24
Updated: 2016-01-24
Packaged: 2018-05-15 22:47:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5803276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bethagain/pseuds/bethagain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s been seven weeks since Rey arrived on Ahch-To. It's winter, she's cold, she's lonely, and Luke Skywalker's nice and all, but he's not very much fun. At least, not until snow arrives on their mountaintop. But what do snowballs have to do with Jedi training?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Snow Day on Ahch-To

It’s been seven weeks since Rey arrived on Ahch-To. 

Luke Skywalker already knew about Han, of course he did. He’d taken his lightsaber from Rey’s hand and clipped it at his belt. Then, still silent, he’d climbed down the seven hundred steps to greet Chewbacca at the Falcon, Rey close behind even though he’d given no indication she should follow. 

Chewie was standing beside the open gangplank. Rey knew him well enough already to recognize his posture: Don’t go near the Wookie if you want to keep both your arms. She’d perched on a rock a respectful distance away and watched Luke walk the last fifty meters alone.

Luke Skywalker was a towering figure in legend. Facing Chewbacca, he wasn’t very tall at all. 

Luke reached out a hand. It was minutes and minutes before Chewie took it, and then minutes and minutes that they stood there, arms’ length apart, a frozen handshake that she thought might turn to a hug, or to violence. 

The only words Chewbacca spoke were for her, a Wookiee version of “If you hurt her, I’ll hurt you.”

Luke nodded, slow and solemn before their hands dropped apart. “I know.”

 

The Falcon lifted into the air with a roar of engines. It made a graceful arc as it sailed into the sky. 

Chewie and Rey had agreed that he'd go and she would stay. But watching the Falcon shrink into the distance, Rey still felt bereft.

 

In the seven weeks she’s been here, the air has turned cold. Luke has shown her how to pack grasses into the cracks between rocks, so that the wind stays out of her stone cell. But the stones themselves hold onto the chill. She moves her narrow bed away from the wall each night and piles on the blankets Luke has brought her. 

During the day she’s warm enough, climbing up and down the hills with Luke mostly silent beside her, practicing defense with a wooden stick in lieu of a lightsaber. Meditating on a cliff above the water, Luke’s soft voice talking her through it, teaching her to pull the warmth of the Force around herself while wind whips through her shirt and slices across the bare stones.

But at night when lessons are over, she’s too exhausted to keep that warm bubble intact. Her calf-length pants and sleeveless shirts are useless against this weather. She’s grateful for the insulated jackets and quilted trousers that Leia insisted on gifting to her, but even they are not quite enough when the wind is howling. She wonders what Leia is doing, what Chewbacca is doing. She trusts that Finn is healing, because she doesn’t know what else to do.

She’s lonely, and she’s cold. Jakku was no paradise but she lived there for so long, and she misses it.

Luke has been kind to her, of course. The man from the legend couldn’t be anything but kind. But he’s not exactly warm and friendly, with his silences and his enigmatic pronouncements and his way of honing in on exactly the hardest part of every lesson. And the way he notices when her mind begins to stray.

Tonight she’s sitting in the doorway of her stone hut. It’s not much warmer in there with the door closed, so she’s left it open and she’s got her back against the doorframe, the chill from the stones seeping through her coat. It’s a cloudy night and it’s black as anything out there. Her lantern lights up a small circle beyond her door.

For the longest time nothing moves. It’s just her and the night on this deserted planet. Even Luke may as well be parsecs away.

She’s about to turn in when she’s startled to see something sparkling in the air. Tiny, glittering spots float down from above and swirl before they disappear into the darkness.

Rey has no idea what she’s seeing, but it doesn’t look dangerous. Maybe it’s some Force thing. She’s seen plenty of strange stuff in the past seven weeks. Maybe Luke’s over there across the way doing some mystical thing with the air.

She closes the door, pulls her cot away from the wall again, and burrows under her pile of blankets.

 

She dreams of Kylo Ren. She dreams of a sword made of sizzling red light that sparks when it hits cool blue. She dreams the impact of one lightsaber against another, the blade in her hand caught against the one pressing down from above, her hands aching and wrists giving out, and her mind screaming: There is something else I’m supposed to do, but I don’t know how.

She dreams of a chasm opening, and she dreams of falling in.

 

She wakes, as she always does, when the light comes through the cracks around her door. She rises, shivering, wishing she could stay under her blankets and not face the cold. Luke’s never told her to get up early but he’s always out there at sunrise, sitting cross-legged on a rock with his faraway gaze directed out toward the water and the sky. She has the very strong idea that if she’s late getting up, he’ll still be there waiting but he’ll _frown_ at her. 

Rey shrugs into a clean shirt and trousers and hurries outside.

 

She stops three steps from the doorway.

Luke is in his usual spot, but everything else is changed.

The ground is white. The tops of the stone cells are white. The stunted trees are dusted in white and the shapes of the bare stones are softened into round, white humps.

Rey knows she’s still standing atop a mountain on Ahch-To, but her mind is back in her dream, back on Starkiller base, back in battle with a young man who should have been a smuggler and a hero like his father. She sees Finn, long slash across his back that she hadn’t known wasn’t fatal. She sees Han Solo fall, and it’s all mixed up with flashing lightsabers and the electrical hiss of Kylo Ren’s blade and white everywhere. 

This is only the second time she has ever seen snow.

She hears her name and it’s a long time, it feels like a long time, before she recognizes the voice. Luke is still seated on his usual rock, but his gaze is on her instead of the sea. 

“You’re troubled,” he says.

That, Rey thinks, is a hell of an understatement.

“You’ve seen troubling things,” he goes on, and Rey, back to herself now, reminds herself of who he is and doesn’t talk back, even though he’s repeating the obvious.

“Sit down,” Luke says. He brushes off some snow for her and she joins him, crosslegged on the flat rock high above the sea.

“Close your eyes,” he says, and she does, taking time to settle her breathing and seek calm in the trance that he’s taught her.

“Search your feelings,” Luke tells her. She begins by looking for the strength that kept her going all those years on Jakku. When she finds it she’s able to look again at her dream.

“I was afraid,” she says.

“It’s all right to be afraid.”

“I was angry,” she says, and beside her she can hear Luke breathe deep.

“There are better ways than anger,” he says. 

“I’m still sad,” she says, remembering Han Solo, remembering his face when she bypassed the compressor and his beloved Falcon remembered the right way to fly.

“Me too,” Luke says.

Rey opens her eyes and looks at the whiteness making strange what had become familiar. “Do you get used to it?” she asks. “What do you do with the memories?”

“You look for the good,” Luke says.

Snow starts to fall again while they’re sitting there. Rey is fascinated by the feel of it on her face, by the sparks of cold when snowflakes find their way beneath her collar. After a while Luke gets up but he tells her “Stay here,” and she does, pushing away her memories and thinking instead how funny the world looks through the snowflakes caught in her eyelashes. She’s just worked up the nerve to open her mouth and try to catch snow on her tongue (would Luke think that was undignified?) when something hits her in the back of the head.

Hair-trigger instincts kick in. Rey whirls, looking for danger.

Instead she sees Luke Skywalker, Last Jedi and Hero of the Galaxy, with a huge grin on his face and a ball of snow in his hand.

She’s so surprised that she’s still gaping at him when the snowball hits her full in the face. 

Rey’s a fast learner. She’s got her own snowball made and in the air before Luke stops laughing, and seconds later the Last Jedi’s wiping snow out of his own eyes.

“You learn that on Jakku?” he manages, snow dripping into his beard.

Rey’s already shaping another snowball. “I learned to hit a charging happabore on the nose, if that’s what you mean.” But she’s grinning too. Luke raises a hand this time and her missile comes careening back at her, and Rey laughs out loud even as she ducks into a crouch and rolls away. 

She comes up covered in snow and gasping from the shock of cold. Luke’s got two snowballs ready and she dodges one, then tries to imitate him and channel the Force to knock the second away. It hits her smack in the chest and she lands on her backside in the soft powder.

“No fair! You used the Force to push that one!”

“Did not,” Luke yells back but good gods he’s _giggling,_ and Rey takes advantage of the opportunity to pelt him with snow before he gets his breath back.

The snowball fight finally ends when Luke calls for truce and Rey plunks down on the ground next to him, and the Last Jedi and his disciple lie there together, tired from laughing, covered in snow, looking up at the sky.

“I’ve got an idea,” Luke says.

 

Rey dreams of Kylo Ren again that night, but it’s not so bad. She finds that she can step back and watch herself, watch him, examine each emotion at each moment of the fight. She thinks, even in her dream, that next time she’ll look at how she could have fought better, cleaner, how she could have let her anger go without losing her strength. 

 

It’s freezing cold again in the morning and Rey finds she’s just as shy as ever, hurrying to get dressed so she won’t keep Luke waiting.

This morning’s different, though. She finds Luke on his knees in the snow, diligently adding to a pile of snowballs. She’s wondering if she should start making some of her own when he looks her way and smiles.

“Something different today,” he says, rising and walking toward her, left hand outstretched.

In his hand is the silver lightsaber that she’d brought back to him. 

“Go on,” he says, and she takes it. She knows enough to hold it away from him when she ignites the blade (gods, she will never forget how she knows that), and he nods in approval as it glimmers its pale blue.

He points to a spot across the clearing. “Go stand over there.”

She does.

“A lightsaber is for defense,” he tells her, as if he hasn’t told her that every day for seven weeks. “We use it as a weapon of attack only when there is no other choice.”

“I understand,” she says.

“Good,” Luke says over his shoulder, as he heads back to his pile of snowballs. “Now,” he says, hefting the first one in his mechanical right hand, “Defend yourself!”

**Author's Note:**

> This is a really different kind of story, but my characterization of Luke almost definitely owes something to [leupagus's](http://archiveofourown.org/users/leupagus/pseuds/leupagus) Trash Fire Jesus in [to the sky without wings](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5609887). If you haven't found this fic already, go read it!


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